


The Buzz Beneath My Skin - Remove My Skin

by AshVee



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Cancer, Gen, Tattoo'd Stiles Stilinski
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-01-20
Packaged: 2018-09-18 19:55:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,753
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9400706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AshVee/pseuds/AshVee
Summary: Follow up to Buzz Beneath My Skin - because apparently I can't write Stiles with a tattoo preventing him from being a werewolf without wanting to make him need the bite.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I've started seven hundred different things in my drafts folder and apparently can't write anything longer than a piece of flash fiction right now, so flash pieces it is. Which means that I'm going to make a bit of a follow up to Buzz because the idea of Stiles needing the bite and not being able to take it was running through my head.
> 
> Warning: Scott bashing, but nothing terrible - I restrained myself, because I really don’t like McCall. Also, apparently my brain decided that when someone is sick Jackson would be a take charge, fix-this-shit type of person. The more I think about it though, I think that'd probably be exactly what he is, so... Who knew?

"That's not going to work, Scott," Stiles said. He felt Scott drop his hand more than saw. The sharp, pinching pain of the bite had woken him, and he couldn't bring himself to open his eyes. The only person that would have gotten into his bedroom at night and bitten him would be Scott.

"Why not?" Scott asked, and Stiles blew a sigh out through his nose. He was too tired to deal with his childhood best friend in the middle of the night, but he bolstered what little courage he had in his intestines and cracked an eyelid.

His left wrist was sitting on his chest where Scott had dropped it. Two little puncture wounds were sluggishly oozing blood, and Stiles could feel a matching pair on the other side.

"You have to ask why?" Stiles asked, giving them an unimpressed glance. Even in the low light from the bathroom, Stiles could see Scott duck his head and scratch at the back of his neck. "You have to want it to take for it to work. Even after all this time you're a terrible werewolf."

"I'm not--"

"Why are you here?" Stiles asked. The little intestinal fortitude that he'd gathered was wearing thin. That had been happening more and more lately, but he figured he had a reason. It was a good question, too.

Stiles had only been back from school for a week and a half, and in that time, he'd not reached out to anyone but his father. His father, the traitor, that had probably called Melissa, who had told Scott, who had climbed through his bedroom window in the middle of the night to give him the gift.

Stiles brain might occasionally cross wires and misfire lately, but he could make the leap.

"Your dad called," Scott said, but he couldn't meet Stiles's eyes. It was alright. Scott hadn't looked Stiles in the eyes since their senior year of high school when they'd had the biggest falling out of either of their lives.

Scott was nothing if not a white knight, had been since they were kids, and Stiles...well, he'd done what he'd needed to do to keep his family safe. Chris Argent had put him in contact with a hunter in Sioux Falls, and Stiles had gone the summer between their Junior and Senior years. When Scott found out, he'd had more than a few words, and Stiles...well, Stiles had never been short on words.

They'd spent their Senior year arguing, bickering, and finally Scott had told Stiles that if he wanted to treat every person that came to town like an enemy until proven otherwise, he could kindly see himself out of the Pack.

Stiles had, and then he'd spent the next summer between Sioux Falls and a little, nothing-of-a-town in Louisiana. Since, he'd added to his tattoos exhaustively, and his knowledge of the shadow world that walked alongside theirs expanded exponentially.

That had been two years ago, and Stiles had put off college as long as his father would allow, delaying by a year. He'd been a sophomore when he started to feel tired. He figured his Adderall wasn't working as well as it should, and started taking more.

That had worked until about six months ago, when his entire world changed. He hadn't told his father at first. He'd ignored the lingering glances in the hallways at his bald head and the way that he almost limped everywhere. Chemo made him sick, which in turn shed what little weight he'd managed to put on.

In the end, he'd sat in a little white room, the oncologist staring across from him with his consoling frown in place, and Stiles had known. Thyroid cancer was a bitch, mostly because it was a gland. Had he not ignored it, had he not just kept popping Adderall until the cavernous lesion in his chest made him short of breath and the mets in his brain had him squinting at his notes...well, had he not done those things, they'd have just cut his thyroid out and he'd gone about his day. As it was, you couldn't cut out your brain, and there were too many little masses in the rest of his chest to cut them all out.

He'd been taken off of treatment, and he'd done something that he figured he should have done from the start. He moved home, and he told his dad.

John...well, John didn't take it well. Stiles had an appointment with an oncologist at the hospital for a second opinion, but he didn't plan on getting much out of it. He owed it to his dad to give him that though, to give him that and whatever time he had left which seemed to fall somewhere between six days and six months--and really, whoever did that math, just wow.

"Your dad called me," Scott said, head still ducked down.

"And you thought you'd just come bite me?" Stiles asked, forcing himself to sit up. It wasn't so much a chore as it was on some days, but he winced as the dull ache in his chest gave a sharp protest. He fumbled a pill bottle and down an oxycodone dry before tossing it back onto his bedside table.

When he looked up, Scott's nose was wrinkled, and he was staring hard.

"Pain medicine," he said simply.

"I know," Scott said with a shrug. "We give something similar to the animals at the clinic. You smell...your dad wasn't lying."

"Because you lie about your son getting ready to take a dirt nap," Stiles snarked. Scott didn't say anything for a long while. Finally, he sighed out a shuttered little breath and sat down on the edge of Stiles's bed, head in his hands and fingers gripping his hair tight. The action made Stiles run a hand through his own slow-growing fuzz. After he'd stopped the chemo, he'd started to get little feather like hairs, fluffy and brittle. Some days he could still pass his hand over his head and brush some of them away.

"Why won't it work, Stiles?" Scott asked, voice that sharp, over-formal tone that meant that Scott was trying not to cry. Stiles couldn't be mad at him when he was like this, when he had so little time left to do anything. Being angry seemed like a waste of time, but it was all he was anymore. Angry or tired.

"You mean why won't the half-assed tooth scrape turn me?" he didn't wait for a response. "Besides the fact that there was no actual intent in that and the fact that I have a ward on my arm?" Stiles tapped his left bicep and raised an eyebrow. 

"I forgot about that," Scott admitted. He still hadn't found the energy to pull his head from his hands. Stiles drew his legs up underneath until he was cross legged and rested his elbow on his knees.

"If I wanted..." Stiles thought about the words that were almost off his lips. He'd thought about his options a lot, and yet...

"What?" Scott asked, and he finally moved to copy Stiles on the bed. It was awkward, the pair of them after so long, fully grown and sitting cross-legged on a twin size bed too small for them. It felt a lot like grade-school, though, and Stiles took what he could get.

"I could have it removed," he said with a shrug. "There are...there are people I've met that would be able to do something about it, if I didn't want to be a wolf." He'd met a woman in Louisiana that had claimed she could pull any illness out of a person and put it into the earth. He'd watched it once or twice when he'd been there, and it had been impressive enough that he'd thought about calling her.

He'd been debating though, and now that it had been on the table, just there in front of him and on his wrist...

"You're not my alpha," Stiles said easily. Which was true. Scott had always been his best friend growing up. Stiles had been Scott's sounding board, his voice of reason, and his dark knight, but Scott? Well, Scott hadn't been Stiles's anything in a long time. "And I don't want to be Peter Hale."

"You wouldn't be Peter," Scott said, half shock and half annoyance.

"Snarky, omega with anger issues and willing to do what it takes to get what he wants?" Stiles asked. He hadn't ever really considered it until that moment, and he swallowed down the bile in his throat as the similarities stacked up in his mind. 

"You're part of the Pack," Scott said firmly. Stiles didn't bother to point out the lie in that, that he hadn't ever been pack and even if he had. Scott's "Pack" was little more than a pair of baby wolves that were just graduating high school. Everyone else had gone their separate ways after high school. Stiles's Pack, as much as he didn't want to admit it, had never been more than Lydia, Erica, Boyd, and Isaac--and damn it, if he had to say it, Jackson.

Allison and Kira and the twins and the baby wolves were Scott's pack. The rest...well, they'd all belonged to Derek. Stiles belonged to Derek, even after--and maybe only after--he'd given up his status as Alpha for his sister.

So Stiles? If Stiles was going to be in a pack, it was that pack, but it was scattered across the globe. Jackson had gone to London, jumped around Europe and had stumbled back to Beacon Hills a few months before Stiles, no college education, no experience, and really just wanting to come home.

Stiles felt bad for the guy because that home he wanted? That home had been Lydia and Danny, and they were off at MIT, learning to take over the world. Derek was gone, following Cora to New Mexico, Arizona, New Deli for all Stiles knew. So that home? That home was gone.

Just like Stiles's home was gone. Because John wasn't there, not really, hadn't been in a long time. When he learned Stiles had lied to him for six months, he'd done everything he could in the last week to find another option, but he'd pulled further away. Stiles had known home in Erica's sarcasm. Lydia's quietly hidden affection. He'd known home in Boyd's silent strength, and Jackson's less and less biting sarcasm. He'd even learned to find home in Derek's over-confident bravado softened by his moments of crushing guilt.

And all of that? Well, all of that was gone. So Stiles? He felt bad for Jackson, but not bad enough to let him know he was back.

"What pack, Scott?" he asked. He watched the indignation cross Scott's face, but slowly comprehension replaced it. There was no pack. Not anymore, hadn't been for a couple years now. "I'm tired. We can...talk this out or whatever you want to do tomorrow, but for right now, man? I'm too tired to discuss whatever deathbed confessions you want to have."

Scott didn't answer. Instead, he pushed himself to his feet, ran his hands over his face, and left through the door. It was a commentary on how far they'd come in their lives that a werewolf could come and go through the front door now. Stiles dropped back down onto his back, closed his eyes, and prayed for morning.

 

The coffee maker gurgled unhappily as the last dregs of water were sucked up into the pump. Stiles drummed his fingers on the rim of his empty coffee cup, waiting out the lingering drops and breathing in the smell of coffee.

Morning had never been his favorite time of day, but anymore, it was when he hurt the least, so he'd learned to at least enjoy them while he could. In a few hours--by noon anyway--his chest would start aching from the deeper breathing of wakefulness and everything would slowly start revolting.

He heard his dad stumble down the stairs, and he pulled another mug from the cabinet and poured them both. Half a cup later, they stared at each other in turns. Stiles finally let the silence eat at him.

"So, Scott was here," he said, giving his father a meaningful glance and holding it until the Sheriff met his look. His eyes flickered down across Stiles to his wrist, a quick bandage in place. Hope and excitement was in every line as he realized what it was.

"He--"

"It didn't work," Stiles said.

"It didn't..." John set the cup down and leaned back in his chair. "It didn't work." His head fell into his hands, and fingers pulled through his hair. Stiles watched as his father ran his hands down the back of his head, to his neck, squeezing and kneading the muscles there.

Of course it hadn't taken. Scott hadn't really wanted to bite him to begin with, and the ward kept it from doing more than being a wound. If he'd been bitten without it, odds were the sad attempt would have...oh, and wasn't that a thought he hadn't had last night.

"Why wouldn't it work?" John asked, and Stiles sighed, hooking his sleeve up over his shoulder. He tapped the ward there with a raised eyebrow. "Been there for four years now." John glared down at the tattoo'd skin like it had offended him.

"Why do you have that?" he asked, voice angry, frustrated. He knew, of course, just like he'd always known. Before, he was happy about it.

"You know what I'd be if this wasn't here?" Stiles asked, the slow thought of dying because of a rejected bite slowly building in his stomach. "I'd be dead. You called Scott to come give me a bite that you didn't know the consequences to, and it could have killed me."

"You're already dying!" John shouted, standing quickly enough to send his chair skittering over the cheap kitchen linoleum. "You're already dying, Stiles." The bluster went out of him like a quenched candle, and he sagged. Stiles looked at him as he stood there, facing the back door. He had one hand up over his eyes, as if the light was too bright, as if the world was too much to look at, to take in.

Maybe it was.

Stiles took a sip to keep from spouting something that would only cause more problems. In the time it took him to bring the cup to his lips and swallow, his father was out the back door.

"Good job, Stiles," he muttered to himself. When his next swallow tasted like ash, he grimaced and dumped the cup down the sink. Out the window he could see his father on a patio chair, a hand over his mouth and tears running down his cheeks. "I shouldn't have come home."

 

Stiles hadn't been out in Beacon Hills since he got home. That had been purposeful, mostly to avoid anyone that might ask questions, but with his father crying on the patio, he figured he owed him something. The only thing he had in him was a nice dinner. 

The grocery store was innocuous enough, especially on a Friday morning, and he leaned against the cart, arms braced against the bar and head only held up enough so that he could see the aisles he wandered down.

It was picking out asparagus that betrayed him, in the end. He knew he should have gone for the frozen steamable bags, but he figured fresh was better.

"Stiles?" He flinched at that, because that voice? Yeah, it was familiar and a mix of annoying and welcoming at the same time.

Jackson, of all people, looked like someone's dad. He had a pair of khaki's and a button up on, and Stiles almost scoffed at him. Instead, he raised an eyebrow and gave him a purposeful once over to bait him.

Stiles had never been very good at fishing.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Jackson asked, stepping into his space, forehead creased and wrenched up like it did sometimes in high school when he was trying to conjure some answer from the air.

"Well, I'm sure you can come up with a list, but personally I think--" He was cut off by a hand fisting in his collar and tugging him toward the door. "Dude! Hands off the merchandise! I have merchandise!" He shouted. "I will be back for that!" He gestured wildly at his cart, stumbling as he was tugged out the door and around to the back of the building.

His back met the brick, and he wheezed against the flaring pain in his chest.

"What is wrong with you?" Jackson asked again, though there was none of the bluster that Stiles remembered from high school. There was only a confused, worried look splitting his face. He was sniffing the air around Stiles's neck, pulling back with a disgusted face. "You smell like--"

Stiles raised an eyebrow, waiting for the inevitable insult, but Jackson had cut himself short.

"Oh," Jackson said. He still had his hand fisted in Stiles's collar. Sharp eyes flickered up over Stiles, his head and his frame. "Oh." He smoothed out the wrinkled collar and took a half-stuttered step backward.

"Are you done manhandling me?" Stiles asked, if only because he wanted to annoy Jackson. Even now, years later, he would rather Jackson be annoyed, angry, than looking at him with pity.

"What are you doing about it?" Jackson asked, the little flicker of devastation on his face disappearing. What replaced it was almost like his captain's resolve on the field.

"Nothing," Stiles said simply, giving a little shrug. "There's...ah...there's nothing to do." Jackson would understand that well enough, given that his mother had passed a year ago from breast cancer. They'd done everything until there was nothing more to do.

"Then what else are you doing?" he asked, voice demanding, commanding really. "Scott--"

"Dude!" Stiles said, giving him a shove. "I'm sick of people telling me I should throw myself on the Altar of Scott McCall to try to save my life!" It wasn't fair, shouting at Jackson, not really. Just like it wasn't fair to be mad at his father, but the only things he had in him were devastation and rage. One was better than the other.

Jackson was a sport about it, all things considering. A harder than necessary shove against his solar plexus had him slamming back into the brick wall. It knocked the wind from his lungs and the anger from every cell of him.

"Come on," Jackson said, voice that arrogant command that it had since Stiles first met him.

"I've got to get--"

"We're going to put our heads together, and you are going to let someone fix this." Jackson gestured at him with a vague hand flip.

"You don't just fix--"

"Stop talking, Stilinski." Stiles sighed, knocked his head against the wall behind him twice, and followed the retreating back of the wolf.

 

The Hale House wasn't the smoldering wreck that he'd come to associate with the long drive up the lane. The old house had been torn down completely, and a few yards off, someone had thrown up a small Morton building.

The large, rolling doors on the end were pulled open, and Stiles could see someone inside, lounging on a couch while someone else, further into the shadow of the building, was bent over a bench.

"Who--"

"Erica and Boyd've been 'rebuilding' the house for a month now."

"They're here?" Stiles asked, startled. He'd known Jackson was in town, but he didn't know he had to work on avoiding them as well. As far as he knew, they'd taken off with Derek.

"Didn't you keep in touch with anyone? I mean I was across an ocean; at least I had an excuse," Jackson said, giving Stiles an awkward sidelong glance.

"They left with Derek, and then...we all kind of broke apart," Stiles shrugged thoughtlessly, annoyed when the movement jostled him. It had been a long day, and his constant, dull, headache was starting to turn into something more sinister.

"What've they got you on?" Jackson asked as he slowed down to avoid losing a tire in a hole in the lane.

"Just some steroids..." Stiles shrugged. "Pain meds, something for nausea."

"Are they working?" Jackson asked, eyeing him critically for just a moment. "At...ah...at the end, the pain medication didn't work for my mom." Stiles didn't know how to respond to that. If he was honest, he always had a headache. His chest always ached. He had a spot in his left thigh he was avoiding discussing with anyone that seemed to throb every time he did more than step lightly. Admitting that though...well. That was something.

And like thinking of it all was enough, it was all gone in a breath. In a slow, trickling pull, the pain seeped from so deep in his bones that he realized he'd forgotten what it was like to not be in pain.

It was a slow, sluggish realization that Jackson's right hand was clenched against his left elbow, and Stiles let him go until the wolf pulled away with an awkward glance toward him.

"Erica...won't like seeing you in pain," Jackson said, as if he needed an excuse. The relief was heady, and it made him feel like he was high, floating on something so far overhead that he couldn't walk.

"Thanks," he finally managed, rubbing at his chest as if to make sure it was still there. "You didn't have to--"

"You're an idiot, Stilinski," he muttered, and put the car in park. "Come on."

For all it had changed, the Hale preserve smelled as good as he remembered, thick like the forest and fresh with the rain that had fallen the night before. It was so green it almost hurt Stiles's eyes. At least, he thought with a smile, the screeching music coming from the Morton building threw off some of the sensory perfection.

The wolves heard them coming, and in a moment, Erica and Boyd were in front of the building. Boyd gave them both a quick nod, a quiet smile, and waved. Erica, for all of her bluster, shone. Stiles had forgotten how much he missed his catwoman until she stood there, smiling and bouncing on the tips of toes.

There was an ease to her now she didn't have in high school, not since he'd seen her before. Her dark eye-make up had been replaced with something soft and natural that made him smile. She was beneath his arms, hugging him too tight and lifting in a half a breath.

"You look terrible!" she said, pushing him away and eyeing him.

"Just got over the flu," Stiles said quickly, eyes cutting to Jackson with a glare.

"Liar," Erica said with a hum. Stiles startled, glancing down at her. Erica had never been able to hear him lie in the past, hadn't been able to tell the difference between his awkward, trilling heartbeat because of the Adderall and a lie.

Stiles just shrugged and let her pull him into the Morton building.

 

This. This exact thing was why Stiles didn't tell anyone, didn't want anyone to know. Because this supernatural heads-together plan-fest was a little too hopeful for what he knew was the truth.

"Worse case scenario, someone skins his shoulder, and Scott bites him," Boyd said, sitting on the couch, an arm around Erica. Stiles shot him a dark glare, wincing at the thought of being skinned.

"Just go have the tattoo removed," Erica said, annoyed and angry. "This shouldn't be a discussion we're having. No matter how much you don't like Scott right now, he can save your life."

Jackson was weighing Stiles and Erica in equal measure, eyes flickering back between the pair of them. There was an air to him that Stiles could place some a mile away. It was the grim realization that she was right, but he didn't want to admit to anyone that Scott McCall was an answer.

"I don't want--"

"No one cares what you want," Erica snapped, glaring at him. She'd been angry since Jackson told them. Stiles sputtered at her, unable to make the words fall off of his tongue.

"So you're going to force the bite on someone who doesn't want it?" Stiles asked. The silence that stretched was deafening in the small space. Jackson, who had been leaning forward, his elbows on his knees, dropped his head down between his shoulders.

"You don't mean that," Boyd said, but there was uncertainty in his voice.

"Tell me I'm lying," Stiles said, challenging. "Scott's not my alpha. I don't want his bite, and I'm not going to--"

"Scott's the problem?" Jackson asked, his head snapped up to stare sharply at Stiles. "You'd rather die than let Scott save you?"

Stiles blew out a sigh. When they said it like that...

"Fine. I'll find you another alpha," Jackson said, standing up and stretching out his back until it popped. "Until then, you don't waste all my work and die." Fingers brush against his collarbone, and Stiles groaned as the pain flittered away from him briefly. He didn't even have the presence of mind in that moment to argue.

Later, laying in bed, Stiles tried not to think about how he didn't have the same gut-deep repulsion from the idea of being the beta of a different alpha. He also tried not to think on the idea that maybe it was pride and hurt keeping him from knowing he'd wake up in a week, a month, a year.

Well, he'd never been emotionally healthy.

 

Jackson was, for lack of a better term, annoyed. The only alpha he knew on this side of either the Atlantic or the Pacific was Scott McCall, and while it wouldn't have been his first choice to be bound to the puppy-dog-eyed do-no-wrong, he couldn't see himself choosing death over it.

Of course, no one said that cancer was one of those things that would be reversed by the change. Asthma and epilepsy weren't terminal, and even if it did...how much did you have to have left in you to survive the bite?

So, yeah, he was annoyed. And worried. And scared. And angry.

He was a lot of things, but mostly he was annoyed because his alpha in France didn't know anyone local other than Scott and an elderly woman in Texas that hadn't returned a phone call in two days.

He'd even done the unthinkable and reached out to Peter Hale of all people, Peter Hale who had also failed to respond to a voicemail and a text message and an angry, ranting email. Annoyed probably didn't cover quite how he was feeling when he opened his front door and nearly walked into Stiles.

"Jesus, Stilinski--"

"It's not my fault you don't use your creepy senses," Stiles said, but there was none of the bluster to the kid--the man, damn it, Jackson had to admit that he was at least an adult if he was willing to die with as much grace.

Jackson reached out and gripped his shoulder, turning him around and pulling whatever pain he could from Stiles's body in the process. In the later days of his mother's illness, he'd been unable to completely draw the pain from her body no matter how long he sat at her bedside. In those days...well, Jackson wasn't going to watch that again.

"Lydia's going to meet us at the Hale house this afternoon," Jackson said, giving Stiles a shove rough enough that he wouldn't complain about it. More than anything, Stiles had pitched a fit about them all treating him with kid-gloves.

"I still don't think she needs to be here," Stiles groused, not for the first or last time, Jackson was sure. 

"Because she's got an idea on getting that ink out of your skin," Jackson said. Misleading and dishonesty hadn't gotten him anywhere, so he thought he might try startling the kid with honesty.

"But I know how to get it off," Stiles said, as if it was the simplest thing in the world. "And you'd need to have--"

Jackson waited for the rapid fire thought processes to run through Stiles's mind. In the last few years, he'd tried to become more patient, but there were times when the billion and a half thoughts to cross the mind of his high school annoyance were difficult to handle. It was a character flaw, sure enough, one that he was more than willing to accept.

"You'd have had to have found another alpha," Stiles said. Jackson could just hear the edge of hope on his voice, and it was painful to squash it.

"Not yet, but at the rate things are going, we want to be ready when we do."

 

"You are a pain in my ass," Lydia said as she opened the door. She could almost feel the singing tension from the other side, and she glared at the pair standing on her stoop out in the sun. 

For a moment, she was the fire of wrath.

In the next, she wanted to snuff even the sun. 

What right did anything have to be bright and happy and warm when Stiles of all people looked like that? He was smaller than she ever remembered, which was dangerous, considering he'd never been large to her memory. 

There were bags beneath his eyes that weren't necessarily foreign to his features, but they were so bruised and dark that they made her think of another Stiles from another time. A chill raced up her spine, and she reached out, gripped the thin fabric over his chest, and tugged him into the house, as if the weight of the atmosphere might crush him. 

"Sit," she commanded, gesturing toward a tall kitchen stool. She'd decided that they'd have this conversation there the moment that she'd spied Stiles. "Do not argue." 

There was no biting phrase off of his tongue, none of the snark and energy that she had come to associate with him. That, really, was more troublesome than his weight loss or his pallor. 

 

Peter was...worried. There. He'd admitted it.

The boy was pale and he smelled so strongly of death that it was nearly a lost cause. He’d been hospitalized a week ago, and a day after, a seething, irate half pint of a werewolf was throwing him through a plate glass window and ranting about his cell phone. 

Erica wasn’t one to be trifled with, not when she was so angry. Not when the next words out of her mouth were that they needed an alpha. Peter had known a handful, but none of them would be willing to risk drawing attention by biting a kid in a hospital bed. Which left him one option, which really rankled him, rankled him more than anything else. 

Derek wasn’t a Beta, but he wasn’t really an alpha either. Since he’d given up the power, there were shadows of that alpha abilities lingering in him, growing stronger each time Peter saw him. The question became if the bite would be strong enough to take, and if Stiles - aware of what was happening - would accept it. The mortality rate of a bite the human didn’t want was far higher, and with Stiles already ill, the odds weren’t good. 

Peter himself had learned the hard way he couldn’t handle the alpha power. His fractured mind pressed too far with that kind of potential. 

Which was why Peter had gone looking for an old acquaintance, an alpha well known for turning betas, using them for his own ends, and then leaving their corpses behind. He’d put him on his knees in front of Derek, and after much cajoling - silly really, his nephew - the baby alpha had ripped his throat out. 

“He won’t survive this,” Derek said simply, staring down at Stiles as he slept. The boy had been moved back to his own home, something about spending his last days in the comfort of his bed. 

John made a distressed little noise in the back of his throat. “If he doesn’t...it’s fast?” 

“Faster than this,” Derek said, a haunted look to his eyes. “I don’t want to be what…” 

“You’re going to do this,” Erica seethed from behind him. “Or I’ll kill you and do it myself.” 

Peter smiled at the vindictive edge to her and pressed his hand into his nephew’s back. “Do it. I’ll get the tattoo.” 

The knife was quiet, and the boy didn’t shift as the sharp edge avulsed the skin of the sigil that would keep the bite from taking hold. Blood seeped down from his shoulder, soaked into the bedding. Another thin trail was lapped up a moment later, before it could drip to the bed beneath his wrist. 

 

Stiles woke up. Full stop. 

The cloying ache in his chest was gone, the vague tension in his thigh vanished. There was none of the drum beat in his chest, none of the nausea that never seemed to leave. 

A weight was settled against his hip, and after he realized he wasn’t standing at the Pearly Gates, he glanced down to see his father, asleep across his lap. 

“He just got to sleep a few minutes ago,” Jackson’s voice was soft, and Stiles startled, nearly jostling his father awake. 

“What the hell-”

“You said Scott was the problem; I went around the problem.” 

“Erica went around the problem.” If waking up to Jackson Whitmore’s voice was terrifying, hearing Peter Hale through a door and over what sounded like a coffee pot was terrifying. 

“Holy shit!” Stiles shouted, startling so badly he woke his father. He skittered backward on the bed, ears aching at the sudden shouting from downstairs. 

“Calm down, Stilinski,” Jackson said, hands out. “You’re fine.” 

“Holy shit,” Stiles muttered, staring at the door. “Peter’s here?” 

“Everyone’s here,” John said, laying a hand against Stiles’s shoulder. “Everyone’s here.” 

 

Stiles sat in a tattoo parlor, his tattoo parlor, with his artist glaring at the back of his head. He’d been there for the better part of two days, working through scorching needle after scorching needle. 

Slowly, over a barely scarred patch at his shoulder, was a slowly darkening “P”.


End file.
